Shutterbox, Gradient
by coincident
Summary: Adhesive labels, chopsticks on the counter, the spaces between morning and night. She might have missed it, but it was still a life together. ItaHina/AU/one-shot.


**A/N:** This is AU, non-massacre. It's sort of a study of shinobi marriages, the things that get sidelined, and the self-sacrificial tendencies of one Uchiha Itachi.

It's very different from what I usually write, and I'm not quite sure what prompted me to write it, but I hope it turned out well. Enjoy.

~X~

Ino hates the endless summer nights, hours and hours of breathing dry cotton and feeling the sweat seal her ANBU mask wetly to her cheekbones, and she tells Hinata as much as she's standing in the doorway red-eyed and sleepless with her surprising beauty left in tatters somewhere around the area of dinner last evening. The night shift smooths away beauty like some kind of sick quiet hurricane, leeches the loveliness from every figure on the graveyard patrol, and Hinata can bet that Ino's deserted her in gradual blips around some unsavory hour like three-twenty-three AM or five-fifty-seven--some hour that hurts her to think about, leaning against her door at a healthy nine-fifteen on a Thursday morning.

"Taichou doesn't seem to mind, though," says Ino, looking over Hinata's shoulder into the apartment. None of Hinata's friends are able to call her husband by name--even though by now, with two years of marriage to her as qualifying credentials, he's ostensibly part of the same repetitive social circle as they are. Hinata herself isn't quite sure how she manages differently; for years the tall boy in the jonin fatigues had been another illustrious alumnus--_ANBU at thirteen, Fugaku must be proud_--at the edge of the schoolyard, and she, like every genin then, had been another awe-inspired student sneaking a "Good morning, senpai" to Uchiha Itachi as her class filed past to the shuriken targets.

"Itachi doesn't mind the night shift, no," she replies.

"He _has _been doing the whole ANBU thing for longer than any of us," says Ino. She sighs and rubs at her eyes, chafing the raw red sclera even more in the process and wincing as she does so. "Well, anyway, if he's already asleep, I'll just get going."

"Do you want me to give him a message?"

"I wanted to ask him if he knew what date our shift was changing--all the border patrol squads are getting scrambled again, some kind of issue at the Iwa border--and they want our squad closer to the disturbance line. I'm not going to get to ask him tonight...I'm taking the night off, it's Chouji's birthday."

"I'll ask him if I see him," says Hinata, but she already knows she won't. Itachi is always asleep before she leaves and gone before she gets back.

"Great. I'm gonna go now--_this _closeto crashing, seriously." Ino yawns widely and gives Hinata a little wave. She only lifts a couple of her fingers, that's how tired she is, diligent Yamanaka Ino who's spent all night rummaging through Earth Country smugglers' minds on her most reliable squad captain's orders. "You tell taichou I won't be seeing him tonight, yeah?"

"Sure."

~X~

When Hinata shuts the door behind her and goes into the kitchen she finds used chopsticks, the sticky residue of rice still clinging to their tips, but their ends aligned parallel as they lie on their dish towel next to the sink. She opens the refrigerator; typical, the pickled plums are still in their glass container, and the pieces of tempura she'd fried the night before sit next to them completely untouched. Sometimes when Itachi gets back he's so tired he bypasses the fridge and the process of reheating and simply eats straight from the container of rice she keeps ready to make her own bento; he usually washes the chopsticks and puts them away before she wakes up, but at times he leaves them out and she sees them lying there at the edge of the sink before she goes to work. He always lays them down perfectly parallel, though, and this to her is the strongest indicator of his presence she gets all morning. She knows he doesn't have to think about it, that's the way his mind works; no matter how tired he is, Itachi is always neat. Even his unconscious movements reflect the precision with which he does everything.

She goes into the bedroom and considers the fact that Itachi even sleeps neatly, one hand holding his pillow in place as another rests, fingers splayed, in the exact center of his chest. The night he's come out of was every bit as hot and miserable as Ino mentioned, so he's shirtless, his standard-issue ANBU spandex folded on his desk with accompanying gauntlets hooked together and stacked on top of it. His breastplate, though, is airing outside on the attached balcony, and Hinata can see the bright red fractals splashed on it as clearly as paint on a canvas. It's not his blood; it never is. She goes out onto the balcony and hoses it down, disinfecting it thoroughly before setting it in the sun to dry and going into her closet to change.

Itachi's neatness could be circumvented on certain occasions, she thinks, as she pulls on her emblematic Hyuuga white robes and ties the black cummerband closed over her hips. She was on the main road on the long-ago day of the mission to Wave, when Sasuke came back riddled all the way through with needles and before the medics could even get close to him Itachi was there, eyes wild and hands steady as he removed every last sliver of steel from between Sasuke's nerves. He didn't lay them down neatly, like chopsticks. He flung them away from him, away from his little brother, and they landed in railroad tracks of crisscrossed scarred patterns all along the dusty road that led into the village. There was no neatness in Itachi's movements then, and the fierceness with which he'd gripped Sasuke's shoulders hadn't been neat either. The younger boy had gasped in pain as Itachi's fingers dug into his flesh.

"Sasuke," Itachi had said, in a voice that sounded wrong, "attempt anything like this once more, and I will make sure you never work as a Konoha shinobi again."

Hinata remembers because that was the day she left her childhood infatuations behind and hoped with all her bewildered, bystander heart that she would someday deserve a man like the one kneeling in the dirt in front of her, reduced from perfection to rubble at the sight of his little brother's injury.

She slings the Hyuuga drawstring bag over her shoulder and casts another glance at Itachi as she's leaving the room. Then she decides, what the hell, it's nine forty-seven and she can spare a moment, so she leans over his supine form and brushes back that beautiful waterfalling hair from his face. The lines under his eyes look deeper, more developed. She wonders what kind of trouble he's been facing at the border.

Itachi is one of Konoha's finest shinobi; his nerves are as brilliantly responsive to movement as violin strings, but some deeper sense in him, some current of lifeblood that runs under the stream of his shinobi knowledge, knows not to wake him at the touch of his wife's fingers. She drops her hand and leaves, not knowing whether to feel glad or upset that he hasn't stirred.

~X~

Itachi wakes up around seven in the evening and peruses the things Hinata has left behind for him, a note about tempura in the fridge, a laundered breastplate, some bills to address and post before he leaves for his shift, and a persistent smell of talcum powder and mild lemon disinfectant that stays in the house even when she's not there and has somehow become, to him, the only scent he can have in his nostrils before he finds the ability to go to sleep.

The night shift begins at eight and Hinata is usually back by nine, so Itachi doesn't wait for her to eat. Hinata is a surprisingly good cook for someone who never set foot in a kitchen growing up, but the tempura tastes a bit clammy and Itachi realizes she probably cooked it the night before. He can't remember the last time he actually had tempura with her the way it was supposed to be had, flash-fried and crunchy with a light shell of batter just barely coating the vegetables. It was almost certainly before he had started taking the night shift for ANBU border patrol. Suddenly a longing for that tempura surges up inside him and his mouth fills with water, even as he dutifully masticates the soggy leftovers he was too tired to reheat upon coming home in the morning. He ignores it, as always. Such cravings seem to come to him more and more these days; in the middle of the night he'll be perching on a tree branch or holding some Kiri infiltrator by his vest, and all of a sudden his sensory memory bombards him with the taste and smell and sight of steam rising from miso potatoes, of perfectly round glistening balls of dango, of crackling wasabi peas in their sheaths. He and Hinata used to make all these things in the year before the night shift, when the evening was still a golden stretch of time between duties and they had nothing to do but laugh and kiss and dirty every dish in their kitchen in the quest to satiate some delectable craving or another.

Itachi washes his dishes and sears scallions and thin slices of beef, which he mixes into soba for Hinata's dinner. He covers the bowl and sets it away. Then he slides the stack of bills towards him and peels an adhesive label off the roll they keep next to the mail stand and the telephone.

The labels say nothing special--_Uchiha Itachi and Uchiha Hinata, Apartment 505, 27 Shigurencho Building, Midori District, Konohagakure. _But it takes Itachi longer to complete his task than it should, because he sets the bills down and takes the labels in both hands and just _looks _at them.

There had been discussions about where to live, of course. Fugaku and Mikoto had pushed for the Uchiha complex, which was, after all, filled with sprawling half-empty buildings just waiting to be used, particularly to be used by the clan heir and his young wife. The Hyuugas had seen the marriage differently; to them it was a matter of housing the clan heiress and her husband, and they'd laid aside an entire suite of rooms in their main house for the young couple to use. But Itachi and Hinata had settled for the Shigurencho Building near the Hokage tower, where most of their friends lived--Chouji and Ino were down the block, and Shisui and Hana Inuzuka lived in the apartment just above theirs--and Itachi finds that really, they didn't miss anything not living within the Uchiha enclosure. The apartment complex is a tall building and in the mornings, Itachi can stand on the balcony of their room and feel thrust right up against the blue sky, with light raining down around him, soaking him through and through with the sensation of sun and wind and clean air.

Now the mornings are usually grim affairs in which he comes home and stumbles into bed, some raid or reconnaissance replaying itself in his mind, and he falls asleep to terse ANBU dreams without even looking out onto the balcony. He doesn't mind. He thinks about these things whether awake or asleep--how many men he'll need for the new border patrols, how long Ino takes to recover between mind probes, whether he should take Kiba or his sister on recon tonight--because after all, he's ANBU, and Itachi never thinks of his job as a _job _because ANBU don't have working hours. They're just on duty. Always.

He doesn't have a problem with that, or so he tells himself until he looks at those adhesive labels.

Itachi knows that clan heiress of the Hyuuga has been a more demanding job for Hinata lately; her father retired and passed the baton to her in the autumn of the previous year. She spends most of her time at a desk scything through paperwork and government idiocy, or else sitting in her office at the main house with her fingers laced together in seals, checking up on branch family members spread out on missions all over the Fire Country. Itachi wonders why they'd been so adamant about her ninja skill when she was younger; she hardly needs it to do her job properly and Itachi thinks she probably hasn't looked at a tenketsu chart in at least a year. He still remembers her family's admonitions in the beginning, of course, particularly at that long-ago chuunin exam at which he'd been proctoring when she went up against Neji and his center of gravity was thrown off-balance.

He had good eyes, but he had never really _seen _her before then. She was Sasuke's classmate, a sedate girl with uncommonly good sense and a tendency to lose her cool in the presence of those she was intimidated by, but Itachi had never really paid attention because he was ANBU and one citizen was another, another nameless face to protect and another faceless name to file away when talking with Sasuke about something or another. Then she had had her fight and he'd stayed as proctor on the sidelines, wearing normal jonin fatigues for the occasion and handing out his calm _begin_s and _match over_s, and he'd almost forgotten to call the fight because he'd spent the entire battle stymied over the fact that Hinata never once knotted her fingers together and stoked Neji's branch seal into agony, although it would have ended the fight in less than a second. Itachi was an expert at reading the small movements that hinted at moves to come. He knew the thought hadn't even crossed her mind.

He was an Uchiha who'd refused the chance to obtain the mangekyou once the coup had fallen apart and there was no longer a need for it. He understood why the Hyuuga girl didn't hold true to her heritage and blast her cousin over the border into humiliation and nightmare. He understood many other things that chuunin exam day, the most unimportant of which was that somewhere between her display of calm defiance and the moment she crashed to the ground with her body in tatters, he'd fallen in love.

Itachi peels the back of an adhesive label and presses it into the corner of one of the bills.

It seems to him that after they've moved away and after they've grown old and maybe even after they've both died, that rectangle on a mundane electricity bill will continue to proclaim its dutiful message--that there was an Uchiha Itachi and an Uchiha Hinata and they lived, they loved, they started a life together, and there was the proof in clear Adobe typeface on its own one-by-three strip of cheap adhesive paper. They're both quiet people and they've always been a quiet couple; they've never made any romantic declarations, and they don't so much as hold hands in public. They're just normal. They pay their bills together. But that's good, for Itachi. Somehow, he likes it better.

The year's been hard for both of them since the night shift. Itachi is ANBU in his dreams and ANBU in the border forests at night, but for those fifteen minutes or so, he's not ANBU at all, really; he's just _Uchiha Itachi _looking at _Uchiha Hinata _on a strip of paper and thinking that although they've only been married for two years, _Uchiha Hinata_'s been real to him since the first time he really saw her at that chuunin exam, and as long as they keep addressing those bills together, she'll be real for a long time to come.

He looks at the clock. It's seven-forty-two, he hasn't actually seen her awake in nine days, and he badly wants to be late to the night shift, but he hasn't been a minute late for ANBU duty in his entire life. He straps his breastplate on and drops the addressed bills in the mail chute on the way out.

~X~

The next morning Hinata is surprised to see him when she wakes up--actually see him; he's awake and staving off tiredness with a bizarre lucidity that she knows comes from adrenaline in the field.

"Was there a fight?" she asks. She's more concerned with bolting out of bed and straining tea and ladling oil onto a griddle; he doesn't look like he's eaten and she can't actually recall the last time she made something fresh for him, something hot that she could set down in front of him and watch him eat. It's about seven in the morning.

Itachi looks at her, long eyelashes heightening the darkness under his eyes. He's swaying very slightly on the spot, but he doesn't sit down, because like all experienced shinobi, he can read his body well enough to know that if he sits down he'll collapse into sleep. She ghosts a hand over his shoulder as she passes him.

"Guerrilla incidents in Iwa. One of their convicts escaped from jail, and their ANBU have been breaking border patrol to search, so there's been some increased surveillance in the area. Some of the resident shinobi there haven't been taking it well."

This is typical Itachi; he tells her exactly what's going on without actually clarifying his involvement in it. She shakes her head and tries to remember how he likes his eggs; they don't keep well, so she hasn't actually made him eggs in a long time.

A warmth envelopes her back. She can feel Itachi's head pillowed on her shoulder. He's bent like a willow wand because he's so tall, and his skintight fatigues are sticky, not quite sweat-absorbent like the label on the package promises. She can smell blood and perspiration and night and--

"Sulfur?"

"Iwa nins," he offers by way of explanation. "There are always explosions."

He used to refuse to touch her after coming back from a mission, mainly because he hated the thought of getting disgusting substances from vanquished enemy shinobi all over her small body. She used to ask him not to treat her like glass. Now he leans on her in a way she's surprised at--not because he's overcome with emotion, but because he's tired and can't sit down and desperately _needs _to stay awake for some reason.

"Let me just give you something cold and you can go to sleep," she says quietly, "what do you want?" and she's about to move towards the fridge, but his arms come around her and hold her so firmly in place that she finds she doesn't want to move, at all. This is the advantage of being Uchiha Itachi's wife; years and years of silence and speaking only when he needs to speak have turned him into a master of nonverbal communication, of being able to tell her exactly what he needs with a minute gesture where another man would have to scale the heights and vulgarities of all possible body language. After so much time, it still makes Hinata weak in the knees, as it did the day she discovered that the lift of an eyebrow from _Sasuke's older brother_, of all people, could send her into flights of fantasy as Naruto's most fervent kisses somehow never could.

"Sunny side up," says Itachi into her shoulder. The childishness of the term sounds so incongruous in his deep, regal voice that she almost laughs, but she catches herself and says, "What?"

"Eggs," says Itachi into her shoulder, and then he turns his head so his lips are sending thrums of pure vibration into her neck, all the way down her body. "I would like to have them sunny side up. With you."

At times like this Hinata can forget that the sky outside is a murky, muggy grey and not the searingly impossible blue it used to be when Itachi's face was framed against it; she can forget that it's seven in the morning and Itachi is so bone tired he can't do much more than lean on her, much less sweep her off her feet; she can forget her entire shutterbox life, in which she sees Itachi in the moments between day and night and he is gone as quickly as the flash from a camera; she can forget the alternating pattern their lives make now when seen in relief against one another, black and white, like the pattern blinds make when light falls through them onto a grimy floor. She _can _forget it, and as soon as she tells herself that, it's forgotten.

Hinata tips her head back. She has to close her eyes against the painful tenderness she feels at the touch of Itachi's lips on her neck, so rare, so wanted, so _there _after so long.

She reaches her hand back and works her fingers into his hair. In a few minutes he'll be asleep, and the whole routine will repeat itself again, but for now, he's keeping himself awake to see her. That's fine with Hinata. At moments like this, she can convince herself she doesn't need anything else.

~X~

As Hinata's life resolves into moments, shutterbox moments like camera photos--_untouched food, a bare hand on his chest, a jonin vest in her blurring vision as she loses a fight_--Itachi's blurs, until he feels like morning and night themselves have streaked into grey. It's hot and the summer nights are black and tepid as lake water, but to Itachi everything is washed out, all one motionless, timeless, unrewarding gradient.

Sometimes, perched on a branch issuing orders in his clear bell-like voice, he loses all sense of the passage of time. He remembers Shisui telling him that the same thing used to happen to him. But Shisui's different; one day he just snapped and dropped out of ANBU altogether--he teaches at the academy now, and all the classes adore handsome Sui-sensei and his beautiful wife, and their three big nin-dogs that the youngest kids are sometimes allowed to play with. Shisui's always checking up on Hinata on his way back from the academy, too. He brings her groceries when she doesn't have time at work, and little presents the kids make out of nin-wire and broken pieces of wood. He's always telling Itachi how happy he is, how he's able to visit Hana at work once in a while, how in the summers when school lets out he dives back into Uchiha clan politics and remind himself that there is a cleaner, brighter life out there than the clan-shackled one he left behind when he tossed his mask away.

"You should too," he told Itachi, the last time they saw one another in the Hokage tower. "What do you say? 'Tachi-sensei?' Come on, that's irresistible. You'd be a hit with them, seriously!"

Itachi's always on the verge of doing it. He loves children. Children are idealistic, like he once was. Like he still is.

But that's the problem, because even when he's bushwhacking on some horrible border patrol and the sweat is snaking down his back and Ino's tired and whining and ANBU is just a fucking _misery trip_, Itachi's still idealistic. He's still able to envision the border like a great starlit map and deploy his squad wherever they need to be to wipe out any threat to Konoha, and he still understands why and how it's got to be done and that he's the one who needs to do it. He doesn't monologue on strength or fate or ambition, but he is consistently and predictably the best squad captain the Hokage has. And sometimes, when the thought of Hinata alone at home is too much to bear, Itachi makes himself remember faces.

There are usually different faces. A tiny baker's daughter who giggles and gives him free cupcakes whenever she sees him. A motherly hairdresser who keeps trying to show him how foundation can cover up the creases under his eyes whenever he goes to get his hair trimmed. Some ridiculous preschoolers in Shisui's class, who keep telling him they want to be Uchiha Itachi when they grow up. Uzumaki Naruto, who Itachi knows will be the best Hokage Konoha has ever had. Sasuke, at varying stages of his life, sometimes small and smiling, happy to see his brother, and sometimes teenaged and scowling but still happy to see his brother nonetheless. And Hinata. Always, always, always Hinata.

Then Itachi thinks of Iwa nin and explosions and the same faces distorted and broken, and he remembers why he does what he does.

He ties the mask a little tighter; the sweat loosens the red tie and it's beginning to irritate him. "Taichou," calls Ino, back again from her night off. She's quite a few trees away, ensconced on a low-hanging branch and too far away to talk to him. He shakes his head and she gives him a thumbs up. Cupping her hands, she says "Shintenshin no jutsu!" and launches herself into the body of Rock Lee, who is sitting on the branch immediately next to Itachi. Ino's body crumples, and her own backup, Hyuuga Neji, catches her and supports her as she falls.

"Has the situation changed?" Itachi asks.

Ino-Lee rolls her head to stave off disorientation and says, "I've been on recon--I'm inhabiting a tufted owl, about a kilometer northeast of here--and I've seen movement. Someone's coming."

Itachi blinks. A _kilometer_? It's nothing. A stone's throw.

"Did you smell sulfur?"

Ino-Lee frowns. "No. But there were explosions, taichou. There's debris for yards and yards around the site--looks like small projectiles."

Projectiles are not standard issue. Itachi nods and Ino launches herself back into her own body. Itachi makes a single gesture and the two of them huddle for their battle positions, Neji at the offensive and Ino behind him, ready to use long range. Lee looks at his captain.

"Taichou?"

"Stay with me, Lee," says Itachi. Many captains had laughed at him, choosing Rock Lee for backup, but Lee is fast and effective enough that nothing has ever hit Itachi when he's concentrating on some kind of genjutsu and is too occupied to pay attention to his surroundings. Lee nods and assumes his favored stance.

"Neji," says Itachi.

"_Byakugan_!"

They wait.

Neji sucks in his breath, sharply.

"What is it, Neji?"

"Taichou!"

They're too slow. There's a flash of blonde hair, iridescent blue eyes, a "Konoha ANBU, yeah?" and then things start exploding.

~X~

It always intrigues Hinata how much Uchiha Itachi has to _give_. She's seen his dedication to Sasuke, to his best friend Shisui, to the village as a whole, and it often bewilders her that there's anything left for her in that slender frame when he's already ladled out so much. Itachi gives unthinkingly of his time and sentiment. She's heard him called emotionless, but it's never made any sense to her. Emotionless people don't seek out the wallflower girl in a class of genin and smile at her; they don't encourage anyone with quiet well-placed words of praise; they certainly don't leave their wives for days on end to make sure others can go home to their wives at all.

Emotionless people don't die for their villages, as she's always afraid Itachi will do someday.

~X~

"What the hell?" cries Ino. "Where are the projectiles?"

"They're not projectiles!" yells Neji back to her. "_Get out of range_!"

Itachi doesn't even have time to shout that they can't get out of range, since whatever weapons the enemy is using--are those _birds_?--are mobile and zone in, one pinwheeling over the other, towards Ino and Neji without any signs of stopping. Itachi activates the sharingan and lurches towards them, Lee not far behind, and they slam their comrades out of range as two explosions erupt into flame where they were not a moment ago.

"You're fast!" says their attacker, and he's an Iwa nin through and through, with a grungy half-yukata covered in rock dust and the three-stone hitai-ate tied jauntily over one eye. In contrast with all of this his golden hair is jarringly bright, and so is the single blue eye Itachi can see under the long, heavy locks. "Eat this, yeah!"

Itachi darts out of the way as the attacker molds something and lobs it at him and trees are decimated, the forest unraveling around them.

"Taichou!" screams Ino in terror.

Itachi knits his hands together and calls, "Gokakyu!" incinerating the attacker in a thousand tongues of Uchiha flame. He hears the attacker laugh--"You've obviously never seen anything like my art before, yeah! Fucking Konoha bastards--_die_!" The boy slaps his hands into a seal and suddenly spits a wave of something--clay?--onto the ground. It roils upon itself and multiplies and grows and grows and grows.

Itachi's mind goes cold as he realizes what the mad bomber is about to do. He doesn't have time--how do explosives like this even exist?--before the Iwa nin yells _"Katsu_!" and his body and mind are both ripped from their bearings, cast into flight over a sea of fire.

He tries to tell himself to remember the faces, but the only one he can see is Hinata's.

~X~

Hinata can remember a sunlit day when Itachi took her to the very top of the Hokage mountain, the highest point in Konoha, and they lay in the light against the sky and simply spoke quietly about nothing in particular, their fingers laced together and lying on the warm rock. It was the very start of summer. The heat was still bearable then. Itachi had bent his head over her wrist and kissed it, gently, and his long hair had caught the light and fractured it like a prism.

He'd stretched his hand out and encompassed within it the entirety of Konoha, cradled in his palm like a pearl. She had felt a bone-jarring admiration for him then, something that has never really diminished but has continued to burn in the back of her mind whenever she thinks of him at all.

"This is what we were made for," he had said. "You and me."

Now Hinata counts the objects that tell her husband was there, two used plates in the sink, a note in clean handwriting saying that the bills were paid last evening, a lingering, pleased feeling in the area of her neck. A pair of used chopsticks. The sensation of waking up every day and seeing the proof of his existence and feeling it, the unbearable weight of love for him and for what he is, and the sound of the door behind him as he leaves--but also, as he comes home.

The shutterbox clicks, another snapshot of their life together filed away in her memory, and her eyes fill with tears.

He existed, she knew him, she loved him. That's enough, really. She can make do with just that, for a little while more at least.

She opens her eyes, smiles, and goes to wash the dishes.

~X~


End file.
